May 13, 2007

My major achievement this week was collecting enough data for my
thesis. The usability tests weren’t as scary as I thought they would
be, and starting with friendlies certainly helped my confidence. It
may not have been the best of experiment designs and I might get raked
over the coals by my thesis committee later, but at least it’s done.
I’m thrilled about that!

I’m also thrilled about the interest interview I had this week with a
team from IBM. We’ll see how that works out. =D

And I still managed to find time to write an article on Emacs mail
productivity tips for LinuxWorld! Not bad. It took me a total of two
and a half hours to write the article. I don’t remember how much time
it took me to develop the configuration I described, though. It was
tons of fun!

I attended a money management seminar and found that I was on the
right track. I’ve read so many personal finance books that the usual
advice is, well, usual, but it was great hearing all sorts of useful
tips from the other students.

On the personal note, I met W’s extended family at a birthday party. I
had a wonderful conversation with his brother’s father-in-law about
technology and then about finance. I’m still a little shy around them.
They’re probably also wondering how to relate to me. Hmm.

I also reconnected with my mom and dad, and might be flying to the
Philippines soon. That may mean cancelling my Mesh session and missing
Toronto Technology Week, but family comes first.

Life is good. This week was very productive, but I also had time to
connect with people and pursue my interests. Being able to talk to
people about stuff—my interest interview, thoughts about life—made
everything much more fun, and even a difficult conversation resulted
in some useful insights.

Next week, I plan to:

Analyze my data

Do more interest and job interviews, figure out my options

Schedule my trip to the Philippines

… and for my creative side, I want to shoot and upload some portraits.